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'Like few others among her contemporaries, Lunde expertly bridges the disciplinary divide between language and literary studies. Language on Display is a rare philological gem that offers as much sociolinguistic insight into the complicated fate of the Russian language after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as it does critical illumination of the role writers play in both articulating and pushing the boundaries of language standards and norms.'
Michael S. Gorham, University of Florida
Post-Soviet Russia may be characterised by 'the language question' permeating all spheres of social, cultural and political life. Key topics in the language debate include the Soviet linguistic legacy, the status of the standard language, foreign loanwords, linguistic variation and language policy. In Language on Display, Ingunn Lunde explores the response of literature to the debate, offering six interpretive readings of post-Soviet Russian prose. Spanning a number of theoretical fields including language variation, linguistic ideologies and literary stylistics, she analyses writers' explicit and implicit responses to central topics of the language debate and in so doing opens up new perspectives for sociolinguistic research on metalanguage.
By exploring the works of such writers as Evgenii Popov, Vladimir Sorokin, Tat'iana Tolstaia, Evgenii Vodolazkin, Valerii Votrin and Mikhail Gigolashvili, Language on Display sheds light both on the role of writers in the broader social and political context of language culture, and on the ways in which the aesthetic practices of literary art can engage with questions affecting the negotiation of linguistic norms.
Ingunn Lunde is Professor of Russian at the University of Bergen.
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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration and translations
Introduction: sociolinguistic change and the response of literature
Part I. Post-Soviet language culture
Chapter 1. Newspeak, counterspeak and linguistic memory
Chapter 2. Challenging the standard
Part II. Language, writers and fiction
Chapter 3. Languages and styles of post-Soviet Russian prose
Chapter 4. The literary norm
Part III. Writers on language: telling and showing
Chapter 5.
Pisateli o iazyke: writers' reflections on language
Chapter 6.
Abanamat: reactions to the ban on profanity in art (2014)
Part IV. Language on display
Chapter 7. Confronting linguistic legacies: Evgenii Popov and Vladimir Sorokin
Chapter 8. Language, time and linguistic dystopia: Tatiana Tolstaia and Evgenii Vodolazkin
Chapter 9. Language ideologies and society: Valerii Votrin and Mikhail Gigolashvili
Conclusion: Towards a theory of performative metalanguage
References
Index
About the author
Ingunn Lunde is Professor of Russian in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen.
Summary
Post-Soviet Russia was a period of linguistic liberalisation, instability and change with varied attempts to regulate and legislate language usage. This book looks at how these debates featured in literature and illustrates the discussion through six interpretive readings of post-Soviet Russian prose.
